Follow up on balloon boy hoax

Following up on my drunken revelry the other night, I wanted to put together, well, sentences that expressed meaning in a way that others would be able to decode. It's been a few days since I've done that, after all.

They are nailing the hoaxers to the wall. Unfortunately, the joke is still on us, and here's why.

Today I was discussing hoaxes with my class. We discussed the various incarnations of the War of the World hoax, the Yes Men and the boy in the balloon. Let's look at the Yes Men, in case you are not familiar with them:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07202007/watch.html

Ah, that Bill Moyers is in excellent fooling today!

When I asked my class, "What makes a good hoax?" the first answer without fail was always, "It's believable." I pointed out that the stuff that we had been looking at was entirely unbelievable (aliens killing everyone in New Jersey, Vivoleum), and yet people still believed it. We decided that a large part of the success of these hoaxes was in the way in which they appropriated authority. In the case of the Yes Men, the mere act of standing on stage in suits as invited guests conferred authority upon them as experts to be listened to, regardless of what boneheaded things came out of their mouths. In the case of the War of the Worlds broadcast, the very fact that it aired on the radio conferred authority upon the broadcast, and the fact that it appropriated the conventions of radio journalism was the icing on the...un-iced thing.

In the case of these hoaxes, it is easy to see, to quote Marshall McCluhan (I thought that I would be original), the medium is the message. But where does that leave us with the balloon hoaxers?

It was such a bad hoax, primarily because it was insanely illegal and the message, if there was one, was "pay attention to me!" But the joke is not that a couple of ill-informed weirdos are using their kids attract attention, but that the media does not say, "Holy shit, these people hoaxed the ever-living bejeezus out of us and we swallowed it! Boy is our face red. Perhaps we should be more careful about what we report and the relative weight we give to these goofy things. Wow, I can't believe we talked about it for six hours! Whew!" Nope. Instead, we keep learning more about these sad and utterly unimportant people. Sure it's cheaper to lurk outside these dongs' house than it is to, I don't know, keep a science bureau open, but it's such a shame that the media is turning what I see as a complete failure of journalistic discernment into an ongoing media circus.

Congrats, media. The hoaxers got what they wanted, and you are the butt of their joke.

HJ